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Article Excerpt
FOR MORE THAN FORTY YEARS, in a steady stream of articles and books, Seymour Martin Lipset (1963a: 248-73; 1963c; 1965; 1986; 1990a; 1990b; 2001) has argued that the American Revolution produced enduring cultural differences between Canada and the United States. In the first instance, he argues, this was because the United Empire Loyalists, who left the new Republic to settle in Upper Canada, had explicitly rejected the values of the American Revolution whereas the Americans left behind were more likely to be committed to those values. In his own words (Lipset, 1996b: 23),
[T]wo nations came out of the American Revolution: Canada the country of the counterrevolution, and the United States the country of the revolution. The northern nation is much more statist, Tory (noblesse oblige), communitarian, elitist, group oriented, and deferential. The southern is much more individualistic, antistatist, antielitiest, supportive of laissez-faire, and less obedient.
For Lipset, these initial cultural differences were subsequently reinforced by other institutional patterns (most notably, by different religious traditions).
Lipset's work has generated a continuing series of articles by Edward Grabb, James Curtis and a variety of co-investigators (hereafter: Grabb et al.) whose consistent message is that Lipset's core argument is wrong (Baer, Grabb and Johnston, 1990; Curtis, Grabb and Baer, 1992; Baer, Grabb and Johnston, 1993; Grabb, Baer and Curtis, 1999; Grabb, Curtis and Baer, 2000; Grabb, Curtis and Baer, 2001; Grabb and Curtis, 2004). Lipset himself (2001: 97) has called attention to the fact that his critics are, for the most part, English-Canadian academics. What makes the English-Canadian background of Lipset's critics worth noting is that their critique of Lipset is not what someone familiar with Canadian popular culture might expect.
Thus, it has been common since the 1960s for many English-Canadian nationalists to emphasize the ways in which Canada is different from the U.S. Lipset (1965) himself took note of this process by pointing out that English-Canadian nationalists were attempting to depict Canada as a more humane and democratic society as compared to the U.S. Although today there is no shortage of commentators writing on the "Americanization" of Canadian culture (a position, note, which itself presupposes that Canada and the U.S. were once relatively distinct cultures), there are still a great many Canadians who continue to emphasize the cultural differences between the two countries. Most recently, for example, this emphasis on cultural difference was central to pollster Michael Adams's Fire and Ice (2003), which won the Giller Prize in the Canadian public-policy literary field. Against this backdrop, however, Grabb et al. have chosen to emphasize similarity, not difference.
Basically, Grabb et al. have advanced two claims. First, they argue that if we pay attention to ordinary people rather than elites, then there is much historical evidence suggesting that local English-speaking populations in the U.S. and Canada around the time of the Revolution shared more or less the same cultural values. In particular, they argue that the United Empire Loyalists were little different (in terms of cultural values) from the Americans who stayed behind. Second, Grabb et al. argue that survey data collected in recent years fail to support the contention that there are significant differences between Canadians (outside Quebec) and Americans on attitudinal and behavioural measures relevant to the Lipset thesis.
But perhaps the most curious feature of this long-running debate is precisely that it has been so long-running. Even writing more than a decade ago, Baer, Grabb and Johnston (1990) could call the debate over the Lipset thesis "one of the most well-known and longstanding arguments in comparative social analysis." This is all the more true today. What no one has yet asked is why this debate is still ongoing after more than four decades.
The participants themselves would likely give a two-part answer. First, I suspect that they would argue--as in fact both sides have argued over the years--that studying Canada and the U.S. in comparative perspective is the best way to gain insight into each society individually (Lipset, 1990a: xiii; Grabb, Curtis and Baer, 2000: 413; Grabb and Curtis, 2004: 2-3). Second, I also imagine that both sides would explain the longevity of this debate by invoking modernist conventions suggesting that the pursuit of empirical truth is what social science is all about. In other words, I suspect they would argue that even in this postmodern age there is some value in using data to decide if the Lipset thesis is right or wrong.
What I want to do in this article is suggest that answers of this sort do not fully explain the durability of this ongoing debate and that in fact the debate has been sustained mainly by unacknowledged ideological claims implicit in the arguments being advanced by each side. As a first step in demonstrating all this, it will be useful to imagine the ways in which the debate between Lipset and his critics might have proceeded differently if the stated concerns of the participants had truly been the concerns fuelling the debate.
Comparing National Cultures
Suppose, for example, that the concerns were indeed with assessing whether or not there were important cultural differences between Canada and the United States: How might we proceed? Lipset has undertaken to focus on the five political values that constitute his American Creed: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populismi and laissez faire. Grabb et al. have increasingly come to focus on a list of four political values: liberty, legal equality, pluralism (tolerance of diversity) and popular sovereignty. Although there are differences between the two lists, even when the same word (like "liberty") is being used, what they have in common is that both lists restrict our attention to a relatively small number of political values. But why such a narrow range? Furthermore, why the exclusive focus on political values?
The fact that Lipset peppers his work with terms like "the American Creed," "national identity," "American character," "national character," etc. easily creates the impression that the values he is discussing are somehow "central" in American culture. Grabb et al. create the same impression for the values on their list. Not only do they also use terms like "national character" (see, for example, Baer, Grabb and Johnston, 1993), but in fact say quite explicitly that the four values they identify are "core principles [that] were crucial to the social-structural and cultural development of Canada and the United States" (Grabb and Curtis, 2004: 57). The fact is, however, that neither Lipset nor Grabb et al. have ever established the centrality of the particular values they discuss to either American or Canadian culture, or presented any evidence establishing that the values on which they focus are more central than other values in the culture (Canadian or American) being studied. Some idea as to how things might...
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